SENTIENT TIMES Dec/Jan 2002

Dreams and Visions: The Fountain of Wisdom

By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.

Many ancient tribal peoples have pursued the wisdom of their dreams and visions for guidance. These an-cient sacred scientists learned that their spiritual unconscious, expressed through the dream and the vision, provided them access to the universe and to the creator. The higher self in the spiritual unconscious can address us in our nighttime dreams as well as in waking visions we might have during our busy day. These transpersonal experiences often come spontaneously and unbidden. If we participate in some type of spiritual exercise like meditation, we can increase our dream recall and it will help us to incubate and generate more dreams and visions. Even putting your dream journal by your bed before going to sleep, complete with a writing instrument and convenient light source, can act as a trigger to stimulate better dream and vision recall. Modern dreamers and those who are sensitive to visions can also access their wisdom to help them in a confusing, materialistic world.

Dreams are spiritual gifts that we receive during sleep. Waking visions are divine visitations that may come to us in the form of a nonphysical guest, such as beautiful or awesome image of an eagle that just appears to us perhaps when we are very tired or involved in our work and our rational resistance is down. Visions appear also on the physical realm. A stranger can come into our lives and seem like an angel because they bring a gift that we need at that particular moment. Joy and excitement come to us from these highly meaningful and numinous experiences that break through our nightly dreams and waking visions.

Dreams and visions in the Old Testament and the New Testament reveal that God visits us in our nightly journey of sleep. Most of the major religious traditions actually appreciate dreams as a form of prayer life. Diligently recording your dreams or visions and sharing them with someone who is important to you and whom you can trust is a form of prayer and fellowship. In our current day materialistic society people sometimes think that the information we get from dreams or visions is not important. Information societies depend on rational technical information whereas the knowledge we receive from dreams and visions comes from the Higher Self, a place of wisdom, the unconscious.

Personal Meaning

David Bohm, a renowned physicist, demonstrates that the universe has an underlying interrelatedness and wholeness that he calls the “implicate order.” The implicate order of the universe unfolds in time and history as the “explicate order,” the organization and harmony that one can perceive in our physical space/time world. The feeling or sensation of being separated and not connected to the whole of the universe in the explicate order is an illusory reality. All reality is in fact interrelated through the implicate order. The new physics shows us that science can look behind the appearances of reality to reveal that consciousness and matter are one. This is what Bohm calls the unfolding meaning of the universe.

Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psy-chologist, uses the term “collective unconscious” throughout his works to represent what Bohm calls the implicate order. Jung’s use of the words “con-sciousness” and “awareness” represent the experience of the explicate order. We face the collective unconscious, the implicate order, as it unfolds wholeness and meaning into our lives through the creative breakthroughs that come from our dreams and visions. Our dreams and visions bring an intuitive learning and a deep personal meaning to our lives by making it possible to experience the collective unconscious. This gives us a sense of oneness with a deep wisdom and a profound connection to the history of humankind.

The symbolic and metaphoric language of the unconscious happens to us in our sleep and comes to us from an intuitive realm that we cannot control. Not being able to control this area of the psyche makes us vulnerable to the unconscious realm and gives us a sense of being passive in this type of learning. The dream or vision uses a language that makes our learning feel as if we are receiving a great and powerful endowment. Information from the dream or vision comes in the language of metaphor and mythology and carries energy from the unconscious to the conscious, making the information more integrative, creative, and meaningful.

The inner dream maker and vision maker is both an artist and a sage because of the beauty of the gifts and deep wisdom that we receive from the unconscious. The surprising, transitory, and ineffable qualities of the dream or vision make us feel like we are having a visitation from God. Jung says in his collected works that God is another name for the collective unconscious. The transitoriness and impermanence of the unconscious message make it feel precious and precarious. The information that we receive from the depths of the unconscious through the dream or vision brings us self-knowledge.

Self-understanding includes knowledge of the opposite sides of us, the beast or the killer within as well as the angel and the Higher Self. The conscious reflection of the unconscious enemy or killer within brings a transformation of the unconscious images and allows for the possibility of a more peaceful and harmonious outer life. It is essential to integrate both sides of our self by working with the unconscious material of the dream or vision. Conscious interpretation of unconscious material gives us direction. The beast of the dream, when integrated, does not have to be seen only in the face of the outer enemy. By integrating our own negative aspects as shown to us by the metaphoric language of the dream or vision, we can transfigure the image through self-reflection. By owning and transforming the image, we create a talisman for the transformation of our very being. This is the healing process and a divine opportunity to have a world of more peace and nonviolence.

The following statement by Dr. Jung warns us that we Americans, who take pride in being a Christian nation, need to integrate the animal beastly side of our unconscious so that we can truly practice peace, nonviolence, and love.

“The Christian love of your neighbour can extend to the animal too, the animal in us, and can surround with love all that a rigidly anthropomorphic view of the world has cruelly repressed. By being repressed into the unconscious, the source from which it originated, the animal in us only becomes more beastlike, and that is no doubt the reason why no religion is so defiled with the spilling of innocent blood as Christianity, and why the world has never seen a bloodier war than the war of the Christian nations.”

The symbol from the dream and vision brings a balance to the nonrational and rational faculties of consciousness, using rationality and discernment to reflect upon the messages of the unconscious material. Rationalism is weak when it one-sidedly represses the nonrational in favor of rational, left-brain thinking. The nonrational needs the corrections of the rational so that our intuitive spiritual side of our psyche can be practical and helpful in solving difficult decisions in this bleak and sad period of our history. The ineffable wisdom of dream and vision symbols integrates the rational and nonrational so that we can create more harmony and integration in our lives and have a more loving family and society. The balance of the conscious and the unconscious through dream and vision awareness helps us to live a symbolic life or spiritual life in our materialistic society.

Symbolic or Spiritual Life

The balance of the opposites in our psyche, such as light and dark, heaven and earth, bad and good, happens through the symbolic life of visions and dreams. A symbol points out a reality that we cannot comprehend because it is beyond the capacity of our mind to understand. To grasp the meaning of the Biblical phrase, “God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we need a symbol. Depth psychology indicates that the symbolic life is a natural religious function of our psyche. We know through the psychology of the symbol that God is an on going experience for many people. When we have a dream or waking vision of God through a symbol, it feels like the experience is beyond the psyche. Depth psychology uses the term “the Self,” and theology uses the term “God,” to talk about a trans-personal, impersonal aspect of reality. A dream or vision image that gives the person an experience of God brings an intimate and personal feeling that points to a reality beyond the comprehension of the mind or psyche.

Different cultures have various names or symbols that point to the same reality that we experience through dream or vision symbols of the image of God. The mystics of different religions seem to agree that they can have an experience of God in their dreams and visions. However, different theologies argue about the dogma and systems of belief concerning these different cultural symbols of God. Depth psychology uses the Self as a metaphor to honor both camps—the experiential, mystical and the theological, dogmatic—by discussing the psychological experience of the image of God. Anthropology has pointed out that most cultures have some sort of spiritual experience that points to a reality beyond the individual mind. Transpersonal or depth psychology is the study of the spiritual practices and the experience of the Self from different cultural mythologies. The psychological study of the mystical experience does not reduce the experience of God but honors the same leap of faith that all people from different cultures have to make to affirm the reality of God. Most cultures support that the primary experience of the Self does occur through the symbolic life of the dream and visions.

Facing the Enemy

Facing our inner enemy through dream and vision work is a way of reducing how many times we see an outer enemy. Dream and vision symbols let us see our inner conflict by giving us an unfamiliar or a recognizable dream or vision image that is betraying us, or threatening us, or that we are suspicious of and don’t trust. Working with the inner adversary helps us to avoid projecting our inner opponent onto our friends or family members, enabling us to claim our own imperfections rather than directing our animosity toward others. Working with the inner adversary also helps us to live as a more loving person by stopping our projection of our inner killer onto the outer world. Meditating on and journaling about the inner suspicious or threatening stranger seems to make our outer world feel much safer. Thich Nhat Hanh, a renowned Buddhist teacher, in his writings and cassette tapes, prescribes a form of active imagination as a way to mend the afflictions of the heart and the distortions of the mind. He suggests a technique of imagining embracing and hugging an enemy as well as using words of love and compassion to talk to our inner beast or outer adversary, which is a process of healing.

The “shadow” is a Jungian term that represents all the aspects of ourselves that we do not accept, that we reject because they do not match our self-concept, and that our peers and our parents did not accept as we grew up. This creates an outer conformity that stifles our inner potential. By bringing out the shadow from the unconscious to the conscious through dream and vision work, we expand our consciousness, making us more mindful and nonattached by withdrawing our projections from objects and people in our outer world. Dr. Jung states that our creative potential exists in the shadow. To bring the inner foe to consciousness through dream or vision work brings more creative potential and wellness to our everyday concrete world.

References
Corbett, L. (1996). The Religious Function of the Psyche. New York: Routledge. Jung, C. G. (1964). Collected Works: Vol. 10. Civilization in Transition. (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kelsey, M. T. (1991). God, Dreams, and Revelation: A Christian Interpretation of Dreams. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress. Peat, F. D. (1997). Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D., is a Licensed Marriage, Child and Family Counselor, co-founder of the Humanistic and Trans-personal Psychotherapy Center in Arcata, California and adjunct faculty at Saybrook Graduate School in peace studies, conflict resolution, creativity and shamanism.

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